MMO Blogging

Two very interesting posts appeared the last few days, I first read the Ancient Gaming Noob’s post and he pointed to Psychochild’s blog. We have covered this subject a while back, also somewhat more Eve specific in the eve blogosphere. The general concensus, or at least how I remembered it, was that blogging wasn’t dead, it’s just past it’s prime time where almost every other Pod pilot seemed to have a blog. Blogs are still a great source of info and a serve a very different purpose from twitter and G+.

How often do you google for something and find the info you were looking for on a blog post ? And how often do you find it by searching on Twitter ? I can hardly find what I tweeted 2 months ago, let along find info from longer ago, 140 characters isn’t enough to express your opinion or explain some new gaming mechanic.

The new thing to do is Let’s Play on youtube. When I started blogging that sort of thing would have been very hard to pull off, bandwidth was limited, let alone processing power to encode a video in a reasonable amount of time. This new trend will probably go the same way as blogging did, a handful of interesting Let’s Players will survive, the rest will slowly fade. It takes a very special personality to pull an engaging let’s play video off. Usually when I try to watch one, I get turned off in the very first minute. Only Beef and Kurtjmac I find very entertaining and a Totalbiscuit video now and then (not really a let’s play but hey I’ll throw him in here).

Anyway, I am getting off track ;). What did struck me was a comment on Psychochild’s blog, that said that the magic was gone. We lost that child like AWE I HAVE TO BLOG ABOUT THIS NOW feeling we had when we started out playing MMOs. I’ll never forget my first walk at level 11 in the night from Thunderbluff to Crossroads surrounded by scary beasts, death lurking at every corner in my first days in WoW. There just is less to write about enthusiastically. When I look at my Eve gameplay nowadays, that is certainly hardly anything to write about, so it’s more metagame posts. How many times can you write about Ice mining, killing some sleepers and doing a bit of PI ?

The two posts mentioned above had a focus on community. I still feel that Eve has a community of bloggers who are then part of a larger community of MMO bloggers. Our numbers might not be as big as they once were, but I feel the quality is better than it once was. We have grown as writers and there is less noise to wade through now.